Flashback Fridays

Flashback Friday: Mr. Machine

~ LobaBlanca

mr_machine

I’m quite surprised that I haven’t posted this one before. I also have very little to say about this particular toy, beyond the fact that I always thought it was one of the most interesting toys I can remember from my childhood. I never owned my own Mr. Machine. One of my aunts had one, and I remember she would sometimes take it out and let it run up and down the apartment hallway, much to my wee delight.

Here is one of the original commercials for Mr. Machine:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/8WHQI5iKYfM

After watching this, I’m almost 100 percent positive that my aunt had one of the reissued 1970s versions, because her version didn’t ring or come apart. It did, however, whistle a jaunty little tune (a most appropriate description for any tune from a toy in a top hat) while wheeling about.

Fun times.

And now that I know that the original version of Mr. Machine came apart, I feel this irresistible need to find my own. I must know what it looks like inside!

Flashback Friday: Mac Tonight

~ LobaBlanca

Time to revisit Loba’s obsession with bizarre company mascots from her youth, thanks to a lovely reminder from one of my favorite ImagiFriendsTM (although we’re friends IRL, so I guess I can’t really refer to him in this way…but I love the classification so very much).

In addition to Spuds MacKenzie trying to convince me that I should like his diluted horse pee beer and Chester Cheetah coercing me to have perpetually stained fingers, or all those kooky kids’ cereal mascots luring me toward their sugary dentally damaging delights, there was this, er, lunatic:

mactonight

Get it? Lun…never mind. Denizens, may I introduce you to Mac Tonight, from that ever-trippy corps of crazy McDonald’s ad campaigns. As I remember it (and that wonderful oracle of truth Wikipedia kind of confirms), our silver sliver-headed songster came about as a means to let us all know that McDonald’s was a really swingin’ dinner-time kinda of lounge, hep cats. Apparently, Ronald was a little too garish for that evening rush that McDonald’s was hoping to drum up. The Golden Arches wanted less red, more blue. Less clown, more…moon?

I get it…night time is the right time (to clog your arteries and succumb to grease-induced zit attacks), so when the Man in the Moon starts to serenade you about when it’s time to head for golden lights, you listen, you dig? Especially when he’s twirling around on a cloud that’s strangely solid enough to hold the weight of a baby grand piano and him, but still light enough to float through the city streets to spread his snappy tune.

[Loba Tangent: Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to notice how silly it was to have a cloud holding up a piano…TPTB quickly replaced the cloud with…a twirling Big Mac. You know, for the realism.]

I snark now about Mac Tonight, but the truth is that I loved this guy when he debuted. That’s the whole point of these wacky mascots, right? Be so ___________ that impressionable people can’t get enough of you or the product you’re shilling? Sadly, though, he wasn’t cool enough to convince me that I should eat Big Macs, which are actually my least favorite McDonald’s offering of all. I’d even choose one of those mystery fish cinder-block burgers before I would order a Big Mac with that disgusting “special sauce” (there is nothing “special” about ruining mayonnaise with ketchup and relish, dammit).

However, he was cool enough to earn his own amazing cavalcade of merchandise, including T-shirts, cups, jackets, belt buckles, toys, hats…I even remember getting my pudgy little paws on a pair of Mac Tonight sunglasses, exactly like this pair:

mtglasses

I loved these sunglasses and wore them for years…long after the little Mac Tonight logo wore off and there was no evidence that they were anything more than a pair of Ray Charles-esque RayBan ripoffs. But that’s okay, considering that Mac Tonight was nothing more than a corporate ripoff of a Bobby Darrin song called “Mac the Knife.” Get it? Yeah, Mac Tonight’s themes were even nothing more than (marginally) reworked lyrics set to the same Darrin tune. It was so blatant (and so very unapproved) that Darrin’s family finally sued McDonald’s, thus bringing an end to Mac Tonight’s night-time TV ad reign…at least here in the States. Apparently, Mac was revived (and CGIed) in 2007 for new commercials for overseas markets in several Asian countries and South Africa. Here’s what the computer-rendered Mac Tonight looks like:

mtcgi

Gone is the Darrin ripoff song and the baby grand. Now, he plays a saxophone and sings a nondescript tune, like this:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/mOlLIP9-vlQ

Meh. Not nearly as groovy as the live action Mac…who was consequently played by Doug Jones. Name not ringing a bell? Don’t worry, denizens, his real face wouldn’t probably ring a bell either. He’s made quite a name for himself in Hollywood, however, for playing amazingly intricate prosthetically disguised characters, including this freakishly disturbing character from Pan’s Labyrinth:

pans-labyrinth

He was also the faun in this movie as well as Abe Sapien in the Hellboy movies. He was also one of the Gentlemen in one of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

buffygentleman

Ah, “Hush.” The episode that introduced Tara Maclay into the Buffyverse. Also, one of the most unnerving hours of television ever filmed.

How the hell did I get from a singing moon to Tara Maclay? It’s a good time for the great taste of the healthy helping of WTFery always ready to be served here at the lair, denizens.

I leave you now with this compilation of Mac Tonight commercials that prompted this whole Flashback. Check the Simpsons cameo. You know you’ve hit the big times when the Simpsons dredge you up! Or, conversely, you know you’ve been on air too long when you have to dredge so deep to the bottom of the pop culture barrel that you reference Mac Tonight (types the wolf who just wrote an entire Flashback Friday on said character…).

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/IrIg18Uby4E

Flashback Friday: 9 to 5

~ lobablanca

Ever wonder what you would get the sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot who has everything? A copy of this movie, of course!

9to5dvd

Two movies immediately spring to mind when I think about my very young years: 9 to 5 and The Wizard of Oz. I don’t really know what you can do with that statement, but it is what it is. CBS owned the rights to both at the time and played both annually. Both, therefore, became an annual ritual for my mom and me. We’d pop a big bowl of popcorn (using an honest-to-goodness hot air corn popper that had a little tray on the top where you could stick butter to be melted by the hot air as it fed through the machine), pour some Pepsi, and settle in for a Friday evening full of either melty wicked witches or bondage-bound bosses.

Memories, eh?

Of course, being only 6 or 7 years old the first time I ever saw 9 to 5, I failed to understand the meaning of a lot of what was going on in the movie. Actually, I don’t think I really understood 90 percent of the movie the first few times I saw it. “Edited-for-television” standards at the time didn’t really help much. It was years before I understood why smoking that “cigarette” made them all giggly and victim to a raging case of the munchies.

[Loba Tangent: Honestly, though, I still don’t understand what else had to be in that cigarette to inspire the hallucinations these women had while high. I guess I just don’t understand Mary Jane at all…]

That being said, I still loved it. I loved the catchy theme song. I loved the silliness. I loved the incredible slapstick elements. Something that I don’t think many people consider or appreciate is the fact that all four of the leads in this movie are amazing physical comedians. Yes, even Dolly Parton. Honestly, I think this might be Parton’s best movie performance. Sorry to all you Straight Talk fans out there…

This is probably also my favorite Jane Fonda role. I’ve admittedly not seen many of her films. It’s not that I hold any contempt toward her for any past political statements she might have made. I just kind of find her…annoying most of the time. However, as Judy Bernly, she perfectly captured the fear and loathing of someone entering a world completely foreign and frightening to her.

And, of course, this was the moment I fell in love with Lily Tomlin. Well before I ever saw any of her comedy routines or Laugh-In or before I saw anything from The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, I met her as Violet Newstead. Perhaps it was because her pot party plot against the Boss Man was so Disneyesque as to be one of the few things I could truly understand as such a little one. Or maybe it’s because she was hilarious in the hospital scenes. Or maybe I just “got” her incredible comedic timing and general grooviness, even at so young an age.

And lest he feel even more abused than he must have felt during the filming of this movie, poor Dabney Coleman. I have to admit, he played the office dick quite well. I’m sure he’s probably a lovely human being, but it was years before I could see him as anything other than Franklin M. Hart, Jr, the “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” who inspired three women to step out from the shadow of the boss man and step up the challenge of showing corporate America that women were more than ready to take their place right by the men in the daily 9-to-5 grind…

Actually, that brings me to a personal gripe about this movie’s title. At what point between 1980 and 19mumblemumble when I joined the workforce did corporate America decide that they needed to tack on an extra 45 minutes to the work day, to make up for that lunch break they “give” employees? Imagine my confusion and irritation when I made it into my first Big Girl gig only to find out that 9 to 5 was a long-forgotten myth among the corporati with whom I now mingled. It’s enough to drive a girl to Skinny and Sweet, I tell ya!

This is another movie from my childhood that I still don’t own on DVD, but I did recently discover that it’s available as a Watch Instantly option on Netflix here in the States. Of course, this needed to happen ASAP. It still makes me laugh, even all these years since the last time I ever watched it with my mom. Honestly, it makes me laugh even more, now that I get so many more of the jokes. I love revisiting movies from my childhood and having whole new layers revealed to me.

While searching YouTube for some clips to post, I actually found this clip of outtakes, which must be from the special edition DVD they released for the 20th anniversary. Good stuff here. Also, I swear that the three actresses really were high during the pot scene, and the outtake of Tomlin kind of supports this theory…oh, and listen closely and you’ll catch Parton telling one of my favorite dirty jokes. It involved Muppets. That’s all I’m saying.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/G37d7TJ74nw

And, because you know you now have this song already stuck in your head ever since the moment you saw the heading of this post, I give you what you’ve been waiting for. It’s a rich man’s game, denizens. Same as it ever was…

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/xAQ2SiSAt-A

Flashback Friday: Neighbors

~ lobablanca

One of my favorite TNG episodes is “Tapestry.” In it, that omnicharming rapscallion Q offers Captain Picard the chance to change a moment from his past that would impact the captain in dire ways in his present. However, true to Q, the offer comes with a price and a lesson, which Picard adeptly sums up:

There are many parts of my youth that I’m not proud of. There were…loose threads…untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads, it’d unravel the tapestry of my life.

I’ve never been impaled by a Nausicaan. I’ve also never had an omnipotent being with blue lips toy with me on a regular basis. However, I appreciate the sentiment of Picard’s statement. We each have spun our own tapestries, with threads connecting us to all aspects of our lives. Sometimes those threads end, lost in a pattern long forgotten for newer weaves, different colors. Sometimes, they loop back in on themselves, leading us once more toward the start of it all.

I recently followed one of those threads, back to the place I once called home. Really, I suppose it was more like my hometown. I didn’t quite make it to my actual childhood home, although I was quite close. It was a bit of a sad homecoming; I returned to say goodbye to the matriarch of the family next to whom I grew up. Actually, she was not only my neighbor, but also my father’s neighbor when he was little. I can still hear her calling my dad by his childhood nickname whenever she saw him, long after the gangly boy who once answered to that name was but another finished pattern in his tapestry. And he always responded.

I’ve actually written about this family before here at the lair…or, more precisely, their swimming pool. And their youngest daughter’s Big Wheel. Their youngest daughter was six years older than me, but she humored my youthful adoration. She taught me how to swim and later how to jump off the diving board, taught me how to roller skate, took me trick-or-treating for the first time.

The parents were generous and earnest, hard-working and with home and hearts always open to family and friends. They also must have possessed infinite reserves of patience, living next door to a chubby little tomboy who loved nothing more than to do raucous activities like bouncing a softball off our chimney bricks for hours, to practice catching pop flies. Or smashing softball after softball after softball over their fence, sometimes even into their pool, while practicing batting. Or spending hours whacking a golf ball all over the back yard, they more than likely cringing from the safety of their house each time they heard it thunk off the walls of my dad’s shed…or the inevitable crash when I sent it through one of his shed windows. Kind of like the time I threw a dart through one of the garage door windows. Then there was that infamous summer I discovered the bow and arrows in the attic. I’m willing to bet the neighbors hustled their dog and cat indoors quite swiftly when they saw me traipsing across our yard with a bow slung across my back.

[Loba Tangent: Truth be told, I bet if you went into the woods right beyond my childhood home, you’d probably find enough softballs, baseballs, tennis balls, golf balls, Frisbees, and, yes, arrows, to stock your own personal phys ed closet. I was apparently a holy terror when it came to outdoor play. Amazingly, I never once broke any of their windows or impaled any of their pets. Bonus.]

As I drove to the funeral home to pay my final respects, I rightfully reminisced about all these things and more. About how the mother and her youngest daughter brought me a stack of coloring books the day our other neighbors’ dog attacked me, leaving me needing nine stitches. About how she always tried to keep her hair dry while swimming, and how she thought it was the strangest, silliest thing that I’d named the family cat “Data.” Or how, on many a school morning, I would have to run out of our house to stop her from driving away with her bag and coffee mug still on top of her car. Little moments, to be sure, but ones that always make me laugh.

Our families are forever linked by the intermingled threads we’ve woven throughout each other’s lives. They were wonderful neighbors and part of the brighter portions of the beginning of my tapestry. Goodbye, Mrs. S. Requiescat in pace.

Flashback Friday: “Too Beautiful Edition”

~ LobaBlanca

I suppose you could call this a copout “Flashback Friday.” I had other post ideas in mind, but then I got sidetracked by scrolling through some of my old posts from those now mythical Angry BloggerTM days.

[Okay, they’re probably only mythical to me…]

I guess I’m trying to relocate my inspiration. Don’t think you’re the only ones, denizens, to notice that all I ever do here anymore is post Flashback Fridays and BookBin entries. I suppose, though, that it’s a bit of a small victory that I’m even back to semi-regular flashbacks. In fact, looking at my post stats, I see that (minus the awesomeness that was Darktober 2012) I haven’t had a month of double-digit posts since last May.

At first, it was simply a lack of time. Actually, it still is kind of the same reason…only now, when I do eke out a bit of time to visit, I’m left with nothing much to say. I’ve got ideas of all kinds floating about in my bonny brain. I’m simply so drained by the time I arrive that I submit to the overpowering pull of sloth…that tricksy, tricksy deadly sin. So tonight I decided to go back to a time when I posted not only almost daily, but several times throughout each day. Of course, I was much angrier back then. Anger is a satisfactory fuel when even creativity fizzles out.

Stop that pigeon!
Stop that pigeon!

I did, however, also find inspiration of the non-Hulk-smash variety. Strange inspiration sometimes…like this poem that I jotted down after a random encounter with a pigeon. The silly thing just stood there on my office windowsill, staring at me for at least a solid 5 minutes. At least, I think it was staring at me. Who knows?

Anyway, for whatever reason, the pigeon paid me a visit and then made me utterly envious when it finally blinked and bobbed before spreading it wings and whisking away into the bright spring sky. Nothing makes you wish for wings quite like being inside an office building when the weather finally starts to turn warm and sunny.

Glint and flash of vernal fire in blood-red iris
As purple and green spark against dull gray down.
Perched upon my windowsill, you beckon

Flashback Friday: Little Shop of…Mermaids?

~ lobablanca

[Lupine apologies for the delayed posting. Life is sometimes exhausting and the bed is sometimes more alluring than even you lovely lot. Sometimes. Not always. Mwah.]

When I was 12 years old, my dad and I discovered a movie at the local video store that we both immediately fell in love with…so much so, that we watched the movie twice during the one-day rental period (and we rented it a few more times after we returned it, whenever we wanted a movie that we knew was guaranteed to make both of us laugh). It was a new release (remember when it took a year or more for movies to go from theater to video?) of a movie

Flashback Friday: Memorex Tapes

~ LobaBlanca

Every now and then, I catch myself saying or thinking something about “the new generation” that makes me sound…and feel ridiculously old. I had one of these moments just a few days ago, when it dawned on me that there’s a generation of kids growing up right now who will never need to know what this is:

Is it real? Or is it...obviously something bootlegged off the radio?
Is it real? Or is it…obviously something bootlegged off the radio?

Truth be told, I guess it’s been quite a while since Memorex tapes meant anything to anyone. But all I have to do, denizens, is look at this clear plastic with the funky geometric shapes, and I am:

  • Sitting in front of the mini boombox that sat in the kitchen, waiting for my current favorite song to play on that evening’s countdown show, frowning in frustration when the DJ won’t stop talking over the song’s intro so I can finally hit record. That’s right…I was an old school music pirate.
  • Dubbing records or asking friends to dub their records. But always remembering to record something silly or bizarre somewhere hidden on the tape before making the trade-off, whether it was the theme song from Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers or an original rap I wrote about a teacher at school (okay, this might’ve just been my friends and me).
  • Hearing the music suddenly slow or stop and then panicking at the sound of crinkling cellophane, only to hit EJECT and see shiny brown tape now turned into a crunchy mess that spools all over the place and can only be fixed with patience…and a sharp pencil.
  • Riding along in the back of the family car while listening to my latest mix tape. Playing on my Walkman. Through headphones with a differently colored cover for each ear.
  • Snapping on the headphones and hooking the Walkman to my shorts so I’d have something to listen to other than the growl and roar of the mower while I spent the better part of every other Saturday afternoon, mowing lawns. So I could make enough money to go buy more Memorex tapes.
  • Catching the familiar glint of sunlight reflecting off streamers of cassette innards, un-spooled and tangled along the median strip, or finding one of these discarded treasures and taking it home to fix it, and discovering that I’d found my first exposure to DC go-go. E.U., baby, all the way.

The mnemonics of Memorex. All right there. In indigo, fuchsia, and yellow. I see this tape and I think of all the artists I’d rip off the radio…Bobby Brown:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/P0FKzPfsxA4

That’s right, kiddies: Before the horrible reality show or helping Whitney destroy herself, he actually had a singing career! Also, if you want an overload of hot 80s mess? Watch this whole video. Yeesh. Or how about Fine Young Cannibals?

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9wSn81dLK6s

Lisa Lisa? Took me years to finally figure out “Que sera que sera” thanks to her screwed-up pronunciation…

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/dxkbTG6PeCI

Escape Club?

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/eoLHrq3z060

Or what about Was (Not Was)? I never could understand why they wanted to walk a dinosaur…

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/zYKupOsaJmk

Good grief, but videos were bizarre back in the day. Maybe we can continue this in a future Flashback. For now, I’m just going to leave this here…for all you go-go-deprived souls…

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Ypcs4c7ihSo

When you get that notion, put your back field in motion…

Flashback Friday: X-Men

~ LobaBlanca

xmen

There are many different entries I could make on this particular topic, focusing on the comics, the movies, the characters, or a little bit of it all. For the purposes of this Flashback, however, I just want to focus on the Saturday morning cartoon that ran from 1992 to 1997.

Actually, all I really want to focus on is the theme song from the cartoon, which was another of the themes discussed during the podcast mentioned in my last Flashback. Of all the cartoon themes from my adolescence, this is definitely on my list of Top Ten Favorites:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/wZAhqEiq4cA

Not only did I love the theme, I adored the cartoon. It was 30 minutes of awesome every Saturday morning at 11 (I always suspected that Fox aired the cartoon so late in the morning because it was geared more toward teens than younger children…and we sure could sleep late when we were teens, eh?). This was also my gateway into the wide wonderful world, not just of this merry band of mutants, but of comics in general. This cartoon made me see comics as something more than silly drawings. The shows were smart and relevant, the characters believable (for the most part) and flawed and provocative, giving me a glimpse of how comics and cartoons had the potential to be something deeper, something greater. They could be full of social commentary, challenging notions, incendiary thoughts…hidden within the line art and primary colors of a cartoon world.

Funny how a half hour Saturday morning cartoon could open up such possibility, especially considering the fact that the show aired during the insouciance of my adolescent years.

Also, these were the character iterations of many of the primary X-Men I first met and, ultimately, the iterations with whom I fell madly, truly, deeply in love. No matter how different they now look, or even how different they looked in this cartoon from their original versions, whenever I think of these particular X-Men, I envision them just as they appeared in this cartoon…massive shoulder pads, yellow spandex, and all.

Maybe at some other point, I’ll say more on the X-Men. For now, though, I’m just going to leave this metal guitar version of the theme song right here, for your enjoyment. Rock on, my mutants. Rock on.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/6Nm7wKc9VB8